MFA

The MFA Annotator integrates with the Montreal Forced Aligner, which can use words with phonemic transcriptions, and the corresponding audio, to force-align words and phones; i.e. determine the start and end time of each speech sound within each word, and thus the start/end times of the words.

In order to function, the Montreal Forced Aligner must first be manually installed.

This annotator cannot install the Montreal Forced Aligner. Under most circumstances you must manually install it in a location that is accessible to you annotation server user.

(The only exception to this is if your server is running in a Docker container, in which case, it's possible that your system has sufficient privileges to install MFA for itself. In this case, you can click the Attempt to Install MFA button below.)

Up-to-date installation instructions for the Montreal Forced Aligner are available here:
https://montreal-forced-aligner.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html

Linux

To install the Montreal Forced Aligner on Linux systems for all users, so that your web server can access it if required:

  1. Download Miniconda:
    wget https://repo.anaconda.com/miniconda/Miniconda3-py38_4.10.3-Linux-x86_64.sh
  2. Start the installer:
    sudo bash Miniconda3-py38_4.10.3-Linux-x86_64.sh
  3. When asked the location to install Miniconda, use:
    /opt/conda
  4. When asked whether the installer should initialize Miniconda, this is unnecessary so you can respond no
  5. Change ownership of the conda files):
    sudo chown -R $USERNAME:$USERNAME /opt/conda
  6. Make conda accessible to all users (so you web server can access MFA):
    chmod -R go-w /opt/conda
    chmod -R go+rX /opt/conda
  7. Install the Montreal Forced Aligner
    /opt/conda/bin/conda create -n aligner -c conda-forge montreal-forced-aligner

Windows

To install the Montreal Forced Aligner on Windows systems for all users, so that your web server can access it if required:

  1. Download the Miniconda installer.
  2. Start the installer by double-clicking it.
  3. When asked, select the Install for all users option. This will install conda somewhere like
    C:\ProgramData\Miniconda3
  4. When asked, tick the add to PATH option.
  5. Install the Montreal Forced Aligner by specifying a path to the environment
    conda create -c conda-forge -p C:\ProgramData\Miniconda3\envs\aligner montreal-forced-aligner

If your server is running in a Docker container, it may be able to install MFA itself, instead of you having to install MFA manually.